Hi, Last year, colleagues and I, developed a PDF/A validator. The result of our work is now distributed under the Apache License 2. We did it because we had not found any open source validator. Now, it looks working. Indeed, it works for a while, but it was hard to have time for it. And we are ready to donate it to Apache. Today this validator is called PaDaF, because there only are PDF and A in the name. Source repository is on github : https://github.com/gba-awl/padaf
Let me now explain what is PDF/A, why I think it could be a part of PDFBox and how we made it. PDF/A is an ISO standard for long term archiving of documents. It describe how should be a PDF document to ensure it may be reproduced in unforeseeable future. Our tool check conformance of the document with these specification. You can learn more about PDF/A on the competence center web site : http://www.pdfa.org This web site propose an bunch of more than 200 invalid PDF/A. A complete PDF/A validator should find the error for at least each document. PaDaF is mainly based on a stream parser (done with javacc) and PDFBox. That's why I think it could be integrated to PDFBox suite. The main artefacts are 2 jars : preflight the validator API and xmpbox an API for xmp manipulation. A 'jar with dependencies' exists and can be used in command line. First we tried to use jempbox for the xmp metadata(an xml block in the PDF that contains metadata). But last year, jempbox was too light for our needs. And because it was necessary to modify interface of jempbox, we decided to do from scratch xmpbox. Today xmpbox is able to read or generate the xmp block of a PDF. We use it to generate metadata in PDF files. It can be used alone without PaDaF. The validation of the file is done with a javacc grammar and PDFBox is used to load objects when more checks must be done. In previous version, we had to patch PDFBox to make all our tests working. Since all the patches we proposed were included (mostly stuffs on fonts), we can now use the standard 1.5.0 version of PDFBox. It is also compatible with current head version of PDFBox when I write that message. So today, we are ready to donate it and let it evolve with PDFBox. There is work to do on the code to make it fitting Apache rule. Let us know if this donation have its place in PDFBox and if there are some hands (and brains) to help us. I know that this mail was quite long, and its english was quite clumsy (making it longer!) but maybe I forgot some piece of information or you have some questions, so don't hesitate, ask... Cordialement, Guillaume
